A Year in Reading: Mark Sarvas

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Quite a few books took my head off in 2009 and, as always, The Millions‘ brief is a tough one to fulfill. I’ve spent much of the year extolling the virtues of Rob Riemen’s slender polemic, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, which makes a moving plea for good old fashioned high idealism. The year also brought magnificent new works from my two favorite novelists, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee – The Infinities and Summertime, respectively. But I suspect The Millions‘ well-read audience doesn’t need me to direct them to either of these remarkable authors.

And so the book that came out of nowhere and captured my imagination is Eric Karpeles’ lovely Paintings in Proust, in which he goes through the entire Proust cycle and reproduces every painting mentioned (or a reasonable substitute when specifics are lacking), marrying the image to the text from the books themselves. I’ve gotten hours upon hours of pleasure returning to this beautifully illustrated, intelligently annotated volume. Sadly, the 2008 book is already out of print and when copies turn up they can be quite expensive – but keep your eye on the used book sites for this gem, bargains can be found. It’s a book I can’t wait to pass on to my daughter when she’s old enough to appreciate it.

Update: Well, it appears I have been happily premature in declaring Paintings in Proust unavailable. As the author notes in the comments below, ” … Paintings in Proust is NOT out of print, but currently in its third printing. There was a disastrously long hiatus of months between the first printing’s selling out so quickly and the appearance of the second printing. Now Paintings in Proust should be available at booksellers everywhere as well as online.” Clearly, I became aware of that book during the noted interregnum, and now the friends on my holiday gift list will be the beneficiary of Karpeles’ timely notice.

I asked Michelle Richmond to share with us the best books she read this year. Michelle is the author of The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress and Dream of the Blue Room. She also keeps a blog, Sans Serif. She put together a really great post for us.The Death of a Beekeeper, by Lars Gustafsson – “Kind readers,” this novel begins. “Strange readers. We begin again.” And so I began this book, again, for probably the fifth or sixth time. Like Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, The Death of a Beekeeper is a book I return to every couple of years when I am in need of something quiet and beautiful. The protagonist is one Lars Lennart Westin, who once taught at “the local elementary school in Ennora on the northern shore of the lake.” By the time this narrative comes into our hands, Westin is dead, but during the writing of the three notebooks that comprise the novel, he is very much alive. The Yellow Notebook is concerned with beekeeping and household expenses; the Blue Notebook is a commonplace book of sorts, containing “newspaper clippings, excerpts from Westin’s readings, and his own stories;” the Damaged Notebook contains telephone numbers and brief notes about the progression of Westin’s cancer.The physical and mental impact of pain, the intricate lives of bees, the frozen landscape of North Vastmanland, and the mysterious workings of a fictional galaxy called Aldebaran are detailed in equal and exquisite measure. I admire the gentle precision of Gustafsson’s prose, the author’s eye for odd and interesting trivia, the novel’s meditative nature. This is a book of ephemera that cannot be easily categorized, a book of lists. For example, page 106 features a “Table of art forms according to their level of difficulty.” Art form number one (the least difficult) is eroticism; at the other end of the spectrum is artillery (number 28). The art of the novel (number 8) is, according to our protagonist, less difficult than squash, weight lifting, high trapeze, bicycle acrobatics, and the building of fountains, but slightly more difficult than surfing and significantly more difficult than poetry, which weighs in at a humble 3.Also on my list for the year: Here is Where We Meet by John Berger; A Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator by Ludvic Vaculik; Writing in Restaurants by David Mamet; Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz; Total Fears by Bohumil Hrabal; and Summertime Waltz by Nina Payne and Gabi Swiatkowska (illustrator), which I’ve been reading to my son Oscar.As always, some of my most rewarding reading experiences have been stories and essays found unexpectedly in magazines big and small, most notably a gorgeous exploration of the secret lives of New Orleans’s hardy termites, published in Harper’s pre-Katrina. (The essay by Duncan Murrell warned of the devastating effects of the termite infestation on the city’s historic buildings. Interestingly, the flooding may have saved the city from the worst the termites had to offer).Which brings us back, sort of, to The Moviegoer, that most perfect of books: “To become aware of the possibility of a search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”Thanks Michelle!

Brandon of The Bibliosphere weighed in with the best book he read during a year in which he got around to catching up on a bunch of classics, new and old:I couldn’t resist joining in on the fun of all the best-of lists making the rounds: the New York Times Book Review printed its own list, as did Publisher’s Weekly. My reading is pretty varied, but I always seem to be a few years behind: the most recent books I read this year were published in 2004.2006 was more of a year for me to play catch-up – Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World, Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein, and Albert Camus’The Stranger were among my favorite books this year. They exemplified everything I love about literature; they were thought-provoking, obsessive, and deeply unsettling. Franz Kafka’sThe Trial disturbed me on a level no horror novel can reach. Mark Z. Danielewski’sHouse of Leaves, while treading a fine line between pretentiousness and genius, obliterated the very idea of what a novel is supposed to be. And Mark Haddon’sThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time gave me one of the freshest and most sympathetic heroes I’ve come across in a long time.But Kazuo Ishiguro’sThe Remains of the Day is, without a doubt, the best book I read this year. It’s funny, infuriating, tragic, and beautifully-written. Neither too long nor too short, this book is, in a word, perfect.Thanks Brandon!

“I would’ve been a rich man if it hadn’t been for Florida.” — Henry Flagler

Congratulations! You’ve founded the most successful company in the history of industry, and you’re rich beyond imagination. What do you do now? Do you do something traditional, like your partner, John D. Rockefeller, and reinvest your capital to secure an empire for your family? Or do you do something bold, something creative? How about developing a new hotel? Sounds great! Even better: you could build two of them, among the finest ever been built — the Ponce de León in St. Augustine, and the Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach. You can call your friend Thomas Edison, who’s recently harnessed residential electricity, and have him install light fixtures so new and so foreign to your guests that they refuse to flip the switches themselves because they’re terrified of being electrocuted. Marvelous! Splendid! But now you find that even this doesn’t do it. No, not quite. Your ambition is insatiable. You direct your attention to the state at large, to its pristine Eastern coastline, stretching 350 miles from Jacksonville to the end of the mainland, where an unnamed town exists as just a speck on a map — a place populated by fewer than 500 people. This place is great, you think. Why not share its splendor with the masses? Why not make it so that anyone with the money can traverse the sunny coast by rail? This could be the next great American frontier! This could be the country’s greatest tourist attraction! New Yorkers and Ohioans (like yourself) could come down in the winter months to rest their heels in the sand, to fish in the daytime and wait out the snow. And as a businessman — or at least that’s what you call yourself — you think of the return on investment. You think of pineapples shipped north from the perpetual warm weather. You think of oranges and sugar. Perfect! You form another company, the Florida East Coast Railway. You do what you set out to do. By 1896, a train leaving Jackonsville in the morning can arrive at the foot of Biscayne Bay that night. The town starts booming, so much so that its grateful settlers offer to name it after you. “Flagler,” you think, has a nice ring to it, but you’re a modest man — or so you tell yourself — and so you ask that they keep the place’s Native title of “Mayaimi,” or “Big Water,” inspired by the state’s great inland sea, Lake Okeechobee, located 80 miles to the north. It’s all falling into place now. It’s gelling together, except again you’re bored. You need excitement. Come on, now! You’re the second wealthiest man on the planet. You are quickly becoming the most significant person to ever set foot in Florida: four years ago, you persuaded the state’s legislature to alter their constitution, to make “incurable insanity” into acceptable grounds for divorce. You did this because, at 61 years old, you’ve fallen in love with a 23 year old and you need to get out of your second marriage. (The law is repealed immediately after you go through with it.) So you get back to scheming and again your gaze turns southward. This time, you notice the state’s busiest and most populous city, which also happens to be its southernmost: Key West. This, you think, is your chance to leave a real legacy, to reshape not only the state you’ve adopted as your own, but also the nation itself. By extending your railway 128 miles south from its current terminus in Miami, you’ll be able to harness the potential of the nation’s 13th-busiest shipping port. A couple problems, is all. One, how the Hell do you build a railroad over the ocean? The islands between Key West and Miami are faintly islands at all; they’re limestone and coral-encrusted speed bumps for waves. Their highest point is 16 feet above sea level, but the majority sits between three and four. Miles of open water span between each one, so you’re going to have to hopscotch your way down to the Conch Republic. Two, the proposed route will cost more than the 742-mile California installment of the Union Pacific Railroad. Three, it’s hurricane season. Four, you’re getting pretty old. No matter, you think. We’ve done it before; we’ll do it again. But how, exactly? For that, you’ll need to read Les Standiford’sLast Train to Paradise, the best book I’ve read all year.

Millions contributor Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family and is a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction. This year, his work appeared in the anthologies Best New American Voices and Best of the Web.When it comes to books, I’m less a gourmet than a gourmand. It’s not that the slim, perfect novel doesn’t excite my palate, but when I’m in the middle of a sensational meal, I want it never to end – or at least to give the illusion of infinitude. And so I hunger for big books – thousand-calorie entrees I wrap rubber bands around to keep the bindings intact.This year, as I approached my thirtieth birthday, these big books appealed to me with even greater urgency. At some point soon, the demands of family life and the writing life are going to leave me with less time for “loose, baggy monsters,” and so I’ve been trying to get the important ones under my belt. After all, there are only so many behemoths out there, right? Well, it turns out that big books share certain Hydra-like properties with books in general. This year, I knocked off ten enormous tomes; I added about twenty to my “to-read” list.The best of the best – the book that came closest to being everything I want in a novel – was Mortals (712 pp), by Norman Rush. It’s a funny book, in that it forgoes the immediate pyrotechnics of Rush’s first novel, Mating (a mere 474 pp), which I also read this year. Still I’m convinced that, once you’ve acquired a taste for Rush’s penetrating yet hugely compassionate voice – his astonishing negative capability – you will find Mortals to be one of the two or three best American novels published this decade. And it just gets better as it goes along: the 100-page climax is almost literally explosive.A close second was Roberto Bolaño’s2666 (893 pp), a novel I’m still thinking about, half a year after first reading it. As with Mortals, I hesitate to recommend diving straight into it; you might want to learn to trust Bolaño, as I did, by first reading his more trenchant performances (Nazi Literature in the Americas (227 pp including epilogue) (review), then Distant Star (149 pp), and then The Savage Detectives (still comparatively lean at 577 pp) (review)). But 2666 is a cabinet of wonders, and a landmark in contemporary letters.Inspired by Joshua Ferris’ 2007 Year in Reading entry, I went on a late-period Henry James bender this year, which (to return to the food metaphor) is sort of like gorging on lobster with a heavy cream sauce. In its rich evocation of human subjectivity, The Wings of the Dove (711 pp) is a dazzling technical achievement, but it’s James’ deep feeling for his characters that makes this my favorite of his novels. Of course, if the representation of subjectivity is to your taste, I should also recommend Under the 82nd Airborne (230 pp in The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg) (review), in which our finest short story writer refines into deft turns of phrase what James took pages and pages to do. I think of Eisenberg and James as two-thirds of a triumvirate: Discoverers of the American Mind. The third third is Saul Bellow, with whom I spent most of June. Of the several books I read, Mr. Sammler’s Planet (260 pp) struck me as the most surprising, courageous, and challenging.Ms. Eisenberg’s advocacy, at a PEN World Voices panel, persuaded me to sate my appetite for German-language literature with Robert Walser’sJakob van Gunten (176 pp), a bewitching (and blessedly brief) evocation of adolescence. I also marveled at Alfred Döblin’s pitch-black Berlin Alexanderplatz (378 closely printed pp). Then I turned back to the big American novel. Joseph McElroy’sWomen and Men (1192 pp) is the longest book I have ever read, by a good 150,000 words. It took me six weeks to finish, at least, and, python-like, I’m still digesting, but the achievements in sections like “Larry,” “the future,” and “Alias Missing Conversation” rank with the best of Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, and David Foster Wallace.Speaking of Wallace, the best book I re-read this year was Infinite Jest (1079 pp with footnotes), which was fresh in my mind when news of the author’s death reached his readers. IJ still looks to me like the fictional high-water-mark of a generation. I welcome debate on this point, but revisiting the book debunks claims that Wallace is too intellectual, too indulgent, or too stylized; here, he does everything the ten next-best American writers can do, and does it better (see, e.g., pp 851- 981). That we’ll never get to see another novel from him is an incalculable loss.Fortunately for us, the reservoir of literary talent in his generation runs deep; following other writers as they advance the cause of fiction forward is a kind of consolation. Trance (505 pp), by Year in Reading participantChristopher Sorrentino, was the book by a young American that most impressed me this year (review). The writing – tough, funny, elegant, jive – really astonished me, as did the way the novel mobilizes the 1970s in service of the now. I guess all history really is present history.The work of nonfiction I most enjoyed in 2008 was Janet Malcolm’sGertrude and Alice: Two Lives (224 pp). Malcolm is at least as good a critic as she is a journalist; her approach to literature is refreshingly humble, nimble, curious, and delighted. (I’m reading her Chekhov book now (205 pp.)) I only made it halfway through Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans this summer (it’s an annual endeavor; 925 pp), but Gertrude and Alice, which I devoured in a single, lovely July day, was a welcome substitute. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention Timothy Donaldson’s book on the development of alphabets, Shapes for Sounds. Reading it is like sitting in on a lecture by the most brilliant professor in the department. It is also – not incidentally – a triumph of design on the order of David Macauley.Finally, I have to say something about political books, which functioned this year as quick, bitter palate-cleansers. For eight years, a small corps of investigative journalists – Hersh, Wright, Mayer, Packer – has been working to keep our government honest. I’d like to nominate Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman for inclusion on this honor roll. In addition to being a riveting, lively, and infuriating read, his book, Angler (384 pp), introduced me to one of the most fascinating literary characters I’ve yet encountered: Richard B. “Dick” Cheney. For pure, mysterious “lifeness” (to borrow the most useful term from James Wood’sHow Fiction Works (248 pp)), Cheney rivals Wallace’s Don Gately, and Rush’s Ray Finch, Bellow’s Artur Sammler, and Eisenberg’s many protagonists. We’ll be chewing over (or choking on) his legacy for years to come. It’s a good thing we’ll have good books, large and small, to nourish us along the way.More from A Year in Reading 2008

2 comments:

I am writing to call your attention to the fact that my book “Paintings in Proust” is NOT out of print, but currently in its third printing. There was a disastrously long hiatus of months between the first printing’s selling out so quickly and the appearance of the second printing. Now “Paintings in Proust” should be available at booksellers everywhere as well as online. Happy holiday book giving!